One City

Hardcore Dharma believes in nothing.

Last Saturday Hardcore Dharma wrapped up its study of Zen Mind: Beginners Mind by Shunryu Suzuki A contentious read! Some folks loved its experiential wisdom (I certainly found reading the book to be a mindfulness practice in and of itself, requiring my utmost attention). Some folks found it overly “big-minded,” ultimate-reality focused and vague. I did find the experience I look forward to in reading a dharma book; that is the “I understand, I agree and I feel better” emotional process was missing. “Where are you when I need you, Jack Kornfield,” I lamented.
Yet at the same time I found myself confronting my relationship to my meditation and dedication to Buddhism fairly deeply. While sorting through Shrunyu Suzuki’s ideas of having no gaining ideas, no expectation of outcome, his reminder to think of Buddhism as “nothing special,” I came face to face with my true tendency to often use meditation and mindfulness as lotion for the irritation of my mind. I found that often, instead of coming to the meditation practice as a way to calm my mind so that I could explore reality more deeply, I often came to “fix” my mind. To calm me down, to get me to work, to get me focused, to bring about artistic catharsis, to avoid smoking a cigarette and so forth. Like so many balms that I employ in my life: yoga, baths, a glass of wine, running, I had started to use meditation as “mood management.” I started to use it towards self-improvement. I mean, meditation is good for you. Listen to Alan Wallace speak and you’ll get pumped to devote the next three years of your life to attaining the ninth stage of Shamatha. And what’s the problem with that?
Reading ZMBM I came to the conclusion that the problem is not that you think meditation is going to be good for you, improve you as a person, an artist, a lover a friend. The problem is that in order to see the illusory nature of our beliefs, its essential to let go of these ideas of improvement. I know that’s what Suzuki Roshi is saying, but it made sense to me, for the first time again, this week. Going into meditation in order for it to calm me down pits myself against myself. Going into meditation accepting the momentary, flawed state of my mind and reality and not try to change it, to rather simply be curious about it, allows me to be in the present moment. Because the greatest struggle in my sitting practice recently (and I know for many people this has got to be true) goes like this:
Non-verbal breath focusing.
Thought 1: I am going to feel so much better/ be super productive once I can really learn how to do this all the time.
Thought 2: Stop thinking, Julia, you just said you were going to feel much better when you learned how to experientially focus on the breath and now you’re thinking.
Thought 3: Don’t chastise yourself Julia, just get back to the breath. Discipline!
Non-verbal breath focusing.
Thought 4: See, Julia, that’s so much better. If only you could learn how to do that all the time you would be so much smarter/more productive.
Thought 5: Ai Chihuahua, Jules! Stop thinking. You’re thinking. Stop thinking. You’re thinking. Oh, honey, please, please please stop thinking ….
And on and on.
Here’s a quotation that particularly interested me in ZMBM:

“I discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing. That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no color – something which exists before all forms and colors appears. This is a very important point. No matter what god of doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a self-centered idea. You strive for a perfect faith in order to save yourself. …In constantly seeking to actualize your idea, you will have no time for composure. But if you are always prepared for accepting everything we see as something appearing from nothing, knowing that there is some reason why a phenomenal existence of such and such form and color appears, then at that moment you will have perfect composure.”

I see this idea of “perfect composure” as resting completely in the present moment, and “believing in nothing” to mean that we must accept the utter emptiness and interdependence of every single moment of our lives. In that because all nature and nurture converge to create our present moment in its appreciable specificity, it is only when we completely let go of our ideals, let go of our ideals about reality, about relationships, about who we are, what we’re capable of, of our opinions and practices, our senses of humor and pride, it is only when we let all that identification go that our Buddha Nature is revealed. Because you can’t experience Buddha Nature and hold on to delusion at the same time. It is through believing, having faith, in that nothing that we find the real, non-delusional substance of experience.
Those were my thoughts on this week. You guys?

If I got nothing else from Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, it was a new way of thinking about emptiness. I’ve noticed over the past 3 weeks (as long as we’ve been reading ZMBM) that the mental “house-cleaning” Suzuki talks about has been happening almost of its own accord. An empty room is a room that can be filled again, and starting from emptiness brings a clarity to the process of filling the room that rearranging in a filled space does not. In that same sense, I have noticed that a whole bunch of ideas I’d been clinging to have been dropping like flies in recent weeks, and that rather than frantically searching for opposing ideas to replace them, I was existing in this space of non-attachment to ideas. The tangible result of this was that I started to feel a lot more open and responsive in the moment when talking with people about conflicts. I have to say, it feels good. Thanks, Hardcore Dharma!

this has been on my mind a lot lately, this notion of goal. i mean even the buddha had a goal up until the very 11th hour no? he decided to sit under that tree until enlightenment, and faced the last vestiges of ego even then.
can we really be expected to walk the path without a goal of some kind, realistically? i’m grateful for the teachings on “no goal”, and similarly spiritual materialism, but i’m starting to think of them in terms of recognizing the goal that we automatically have, or ego’s viewpoint as we approach practice, and not feel bad that we have it. on the one hand, it as perhaps just another phenomenon that is just *going* to arise in all likelihood. maybe these teachings are more of a road map, pointing out what we’re going to encounter as we progress. “there be dragons here.” not so much that we’re supposed to make a goal out of having no-goal. something like that.

>overly “big-minded”, ultmate reality focused and vague
Funny, I haven’t met too many people who have that reaction to this classic book, but I’m not too surprised that some had it. As I commented in another post of yours (I’m glad Ethan is linking to these posts from his FB page …) Suzuki only seems to be being vague — in fact he’s talking about something extremely precise, practical, down to earth, and extremely relevant to one’s moment to moment existence. I like your take on the above passage, it gets at an aspect of what Suzuki is trying to get at.
However, there are even deeper levels at which Suzuki’s teaching can be appreciated. That’s one thing I love about the book; you can keep coming back to it and keep finding new treasures in it.
The “no gaining idea” emphasis of the book, for example, is truly inexhaustible in its application. There are intricate inconceivable dimensions of our lives and being to which this applies, in shockingly liberating ways. It’s not, of course, simply an admonition to blob out — it’s an admonition to wake up. In every moment, simply stay with whatever it is that is happening, rather than struggling with it — if you really take this to heart, even neurosis can open up to something vast, which you can see as having been “there”, “hyperpresent” as my teacher likes to say, even when you thought you were lost and wandering. Is what Suzuki is talking about “too big minded”? It is certainly about big mind, but that big mind is not far away, off in some nirvana, hard to access. It is about our true reality RIGHT NOW, hyperpresent, closer to you than your nose. Sure, it’s hard to realize this is the case … but it is manifestly is the case, at all times, even before you sit on the cushion, and Suzuki is trying to help all of us to have access to that which is available to all of us.

I have also been wrestling with materialism, especially, spiritual materialism. But I just cant get my head around doing something, anything with out a goal. I read this by Trungpa and it was entertaining.
WE LIVE AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS
We may try to be a spiritually inclined person who does not care about money. We want to be free of worldly concerns. However, trying to lead life completely free from money or materialism lacks clarity and real feeling. Particularly in this highly organized society, we live at the expense of others, unless we ourselves contribute something. Whether we are living in a remote place, such as the north of Scotland, or wherever we are, we still need food, and this food is produced by somebody. This food is the product of someone’s work. Someone has been working, going to a great deal of trouble to produce our food. Some people may spend their lives purely churning milk in order to produce butter. Some people spend their whole lives just screwing bolts into things. Most of their lives are just spent doing that. People are trained in the beginning to do regular, ordinary work, and they do it.
When the time comes to retire, they feel something is missing, something has been lost. Those people suffer, but they don’t think in terms of suffering or pain, because they have so bravely accepted their lives and ignored all the other aspects of life. They close one eye and just do it, just one thing. The world is made out of this, the present world anyway. Perhaps it has always been this way. This is not just a question of money alone, but appreciating the practicality of life and having compassion. There is a limit to how much freedom we take.

I apologize for being too expository here, as I know few of you know me; please take my posts on this topic in the spirit of an offering. I’m a visitor from another sangha hoping to share something from my sangha and our practice in the spirit of Dharma exchange, so to speak. (My teacher is an American authorized to teach by a Dzogchen/Nyingma lama, though he also includes a lot of Chan/Zen teachings). I’ve always found both Trungpa and Suzuki to be very interesting teachers.
>But I just cant get my head around doing
>something, anything with out a goal
It’s a really difficult koan. On the one hand, it seems the purpose of practice is to attain enlightenment, to be free from the cycles of karma, to attain liberation. That’s one story.
Yet, the Heart Sutra says: “There is no suffering, no origin of suffering, no cessation of suffering, and no path. There is no wisdom and no attainment. Because there is nothing to be attained, the Bodhisattva relies on prajnaparamita, and has no mental obstructions.”
Of course, the very ones who proclaim the teachings of “no attainment” are people who themselves have done quite a bit of practice, so is there a contradiction here?
Not at all. That’s the koan.
My own teacher talks about this a great deal. His way of speaking of it is simple: of course, at first, we are so inured to the “goal oriented” mind that that’s all we have to work with (seemingly). So, if we need some sort of idea of a goal to practice, that may be unavoidable.
But to the extent we hold onto the idea of a goal, of a result we are trying to attain … practice is obstructed. That’s not only Suzuki and Trungpa’s view, it’s his view. I have to say that in my many years of practice, I’ve come to realize that these great teachers were, as one might hope, entirely correct.
But that doesn’t make it easy to understand what the hell they’re talking about.
Ultimately an intellectual understanding of this is not entirely possible, though I do believe it’s very important to try to understand it intellectually as best we can, because a purely “experiential” understanding, as some put it, can be dislodged without careful study. That’s an important point worth noting.
One view I have of this is something along these lines; it’s a picture, so to speak. Which is to say it is inaccurate, as all pictures are.
But essentially: if we realize that who we think we are (the so-called “self”) is really just a sort of phantom, a kind of tiny fragment of a much larger landscape of who we really are, in a deeper sense, then to think in terms of a “goal” is usually to think in terms of the “self” accomplishing or “doing” it. Yet the whole point of all this is to realize that this little “self” is not really who we are, we are not limited to that, we’re much bigger than that.
Thinking in terms of a goal is thinking in terms of a small self doing or accomplishing the goal.
Practice is not a method for the self to accomplish enlightenment. Such a project is impossible. The “self” cannot accomplish this.
Practice is more like a posture, a gesture, a way of aligning ourselves with the radical reality of our true selves, which is vast. Big Mind, so to speak. By making this gesture we allow our larger reality a chance to come forward on its own. It’s always there, but we ignore it, we crowd it out. Even though we ignore it, it is still there, still functioning. We don’t have to produce it. We don’t have to “achieve” it or become it. We are always already Big Mind. To the extent we can relax our desire to “achieve” enlightenment, we make it easier for us to be who and what we already are, to relax into that larger being, to let it be what it already is.
Practice is important, even perhaps essential for most people; but it is not an action undertaken by the self to effect a result. It is more like a way of aligning ourselves with the resonance of the universe, which is already vibrating whether we feel or hear it or not. By doing so we don’t cause our self to achieve a goal, but we may allow our Big Mind or Being to come forward more visibly into our conscious life and awareness. If we have a job it might be to get out of its way; but we don’t even have to do that, really; as it is always there whether we get out of its way or not.

Never underestimate the value of simplicity.
I read this in my notes today from the teachings of Her Eminence Mindrolling Jetsün Khandro Rinpoche.
“The origination of meditation is so that a person can taste their own fundamental nature”
“Don’t make it complicated. Buddhism doesn’t require anything except to be a good person.”

@Mitsu: “Ultimately an intellectual understanding of this is not entirely possible, though I do believe it’s very important to try to understand it intellectually as best we can, because a purely “experiential” understanding, as some put it, can be dislodged without careful study. That’s an important point worth noting.”
Yes. I agree.
Also I think “get out of your own way” is a really useful way to think about the path and the goal/no goal discussion.

Thank you, Julia May Jonas.
>Don’t make it complicated. Buddhism doesn’t require anything except to be a good person.
But do you know *how* to be a good person? I recall reading someone who encountered Buddhism for the first time, and said that for many years he’d been told by religious figures to be good, to be good, to be good … but no one told him *how* to be good. Buddhism was the first approach that actually gave him pointers on how one can go about being a good person, not just telling him that he ought to be a good person.
In fact, I agree that the fundamental truth of our nature is incredibly simple. But I don’t agree that this is at all obvious, and I don’t agree that most people can simply “be a good person” using their ordinary habits of mind, body, and energy, without really waking up. Waking up is not easy.
We begin with all sorts of layers of complicated ideas about who we are and what our situation is, most of which are off the track, even though we don’t realize it. The ideas we have about the self, our place in the world, what it means to be “a good person” and how we are to achieve that are in fact monstrously over-complex. So we don’t begin from simplicity — which is why teachings are often confusing, paradoxical, or seemingly complex. What they’re trying to get us to see is not complex, it is WE who are complex.
So, yes to simplicity, but no to thinking that a simple presentation is necessarily going to work for everyone. It may work for some, but not for others. That’s why there so many diverse practices and approaches, including very complex Madhyamika philosophy. No matter how complex the teaching may appear, the point is very, very simple — but if you think you know what that simple point is right at the beginning, you’re probably very wrong. It’s better to think you don’t know, at every stage; until you realize that you can’t know. That’s real knowledge!

Hi Mitsu,
Unfortunately, I don’t have the direct quote from HE Khandro Rinpoche. I know she has greater skill in delivering this message. So bear with me as I work it out.
Just because that “someone” found the right fit in Buddhism, it doesn’t mean that the philosophy of those “religious figures” was not good.
I agree that waking up may not be easy. But I do not agree that we do not know how to discern between what’s good and what’s bad. (forgive the double negatives – i’m not a writer)
We are confused. Yes. We are habituated. Yes. And the practices are geared toward illunimanting our confusion as well as our enlightened aspects.
But there is a risk of overly intellectual meandering – it comes in the form of entertainment and ego confirmation.
So that instead of using the teachings as a a tool to advance wisdom within one self and others it becomes a tool for the advancement of ego.
We are not in search of knowlege.
We are in search of WISDOM.

All I can say, Damaris, is that I appreciate your concern, and I certainly agree that mere intellectual speculation is quite problematic and even harmful, but it doesn’t apply to what I am talking about, at all. Nor is it what the Zen masters are doing, or the Dzogchen masters, or any of the great Mahayana teachers.
I will say, however, that if you think you are sure you know how to distinguish between what is good and what is bad, then I would suggest you contemplate that certainty more carefully when you next practice. I think you might find it more subtle a distinction than you realize.
I’ll end with a quote from Seung Sahn, the Korean Zen master:
———–
Good and bad have no self nature. You make the category “good,” so you have good. You make the category ”bad,” so you have bad. Zen practice is about not making “good” and “bad.” When you practice, what is your original face? If you think, “I am bad,” then you have bad. Don’t think that, don’t be attached to “I am bad.” Just bring your attention back to the question “What am I doing?” If you do a bad action or make a big mistake, and you think “I am bad,” then that bad never disappears.
The mistake was made already, so how do we make it correct? How to make it correct is a very important point. Don’t be attached to bad, and soon return to “What am I doing now?”

(I should add: the problem is precisely that if you don’t question your certainty, what you think you know, the dualistic distinctions that seem so clear to you, those themselves are what obscure wisdom. You don’t have to “find” wisdom; you simply need to get out of its way, as I was saying before. Relying on your initial dualistic assumptions, good vs bad, for example, is a recipie for obscuring wisdom.)

Ah, one more remark. I went to look up the teachings of HE Khandro Rinpoche; very beautiful! I found these texts here:http://www.vkr.org/teachings/newyork/index.cfm
All I can say is certainly agree with what she is saying (even though I disagree, somewhat, with respect, with what you were saying, above). There’s no contradiction between what she’s saying and what I’m trying to convey here, it’s just a difference in emphasis.
If all you’re doing is talking about emptiness intellectually, then of course that is pointless. Talking about emptiness is not the same as realizing it; and even if you glimpse it in practice you can get attached to it, and that is also one-sided, a sort of dharma sickness. Ultimately all of this has to be practiced in the world, otherwise it is absurd; it doesn’t even have to be thought of as Buddhism, it’s just living life in an awake fashion. So I certainly agree with all of that.
But she is not saying the emptiness teachings are themselves problematic. They are the heart of Buddhist teaching! You cannot skip over those, because that is the “how” of “how to be a good person.” As she points out, without emptiness, one gets stuck in the relative, and becomes just a selfish person.
I suppose I think that in her desire to emphasize compassion, she may be making it seem that realization of emptiness is no big deal, which I don’t think could be her intention, and it would be mistake if someone came away with that impression. Yes, we can’t get stuck in emptiness, but emptiness is central to the actual practice as it can be realized in the world, in our lives. The point of what my teachers and many other teachers are saying is not just “let’s get weird” and talk about crazy-sounding stuff to make ourselves feel important! It can only be helpful if we actually put it to practice in the world. But, keeping that in mind — if you do take these teachings in that spirit, while actually practicing them in the world, then they can be very helpful. I don’t think HE Khandro Rinpoche is saying anything I disagree with in that respect, at all.

I’m sorry we can’t seem to communicate, damaris! All I can say is, what you are saying is not what she is saying. I am sure she is not attacking the Zen approach, or philosophical Buddhism. It is very easy to misinterpret these teachers. However, we will have to agree to disagree. Gassho.

I’m sorry that you wish to make this a sort of doctrinal dispute, damaris, when in fact there’s no dispute between my teacher and yours. I’m quite sure if they got together in the same room and had a conversation, they’d get along quite well. Simplicity IS key, and that’s in fact what I’m talking about, above. The fact that it may sound confusing or odd doesn’t make it complicated.
What HE Khandro Rinpoche is quite right in her talks — that is to say, it’s a mistake to turn practice into a search for something far away, complicated, in the clouds, etc. In fact the whole point is right here and now, as things already are, as-it-is.
However, to realize what this really means, though it is incredibly simple, is actually rather difficult. It is simple, yet strangely difficult.
So, I have no quarrel with what your teacher says, at all.
Regarding good and bad, I’ll quote HE Khandro Rinpoche herself, who expresses it very beautifully, here:
“As long as we’re dependent on existing in a relative world, then creating something good, something spacious in the foundation is more sensible than creating something negative. That’s why accumulating positive karma and abandoning negative karma is an important part of practice. Ultimately, [however], when we talk about letting go of grasping, we’re talking about grasping to any kind of illusion–both positive as well as negative karma.”

(I suggest, if you disagree with me, that you go ahead and ask your own teacher about it, rather than continuing to talk about it with me, here. Internet forums are good for some things but when it comes to matters like this, it’s better to do it in person, with your teacher, with people you trust. Since you do not know me, you’re being rather antagonistic towards me, which is understandable, but I hold no antagonism towards you, and certainly not towards HE Khandro Rinpoche. But unless we were to meet in person, I think it’s probably not going to work to try to debate this subject online.)

I should also mention one thing: reading HE Khandro Rinpoche’s words does make me want to apologize for a mistake I made, above, which is that I failed to clearly convey what I was trying to express. There’s nothing complex about the fundamental truth of our being, of reality as-it-is, but I, for one, find it difficult to find ways to express this truth, this basic reality, in ways that are as simple as its reality. My own experience of emptiness, of fundamental truth, is almost unbelievably simple — and I do strive, as best I can, to express it in my own writings and my conversations with others as clearly as possible. However, there’s no doubt that I usually fail at this. Looking over the history of thousands of years of Buddhist teachings, however, many of which are incredibly difficult to understand, I think I am certainly not the first to suffer from this fault. HE Khandro Rinpoche’s admonition to express things as simply as possible is certainly one well worth keeping in mind.

wow Mitsu,
My world has gotten smaller. I checked out your Syntheticzero website last week when I was researching stuff on the Bronx Council of the Arts. Your right next to the Mott Haven Library aren’t you.
I used to live in Mitchell projects right across the street from the 40th precinct. and St Jerome’s was my elementary school.
I’m emailing right now.

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